Aiming for information utopia

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Monthly Archives: July 2006

Considering the age of email as a technology, and the plethora of clients available, the situation is tragic. Here is a line-up of the clients I’ve used the last few years, and the reason I stopped using each and every one of them. Some simplifications are made, such as in the use of words like “cannot”. Yes, there are often hacks to circumvent the limitations. No, I won’t go into why using a closed source, 4 year old, unmaintained, 3rd party plugin is a bad idea.

Outlook

CERN uses Exchange, so Windows desktops come with Outlook 2003 installed per default. I’m an open source enthusiast, but at first I thought it was a good idea to use what my colleagues used (and continue to use).

Pros:

Fast, probably because of close integration with the server

Saves message settings (such as flags) on the server, so I can set a TODO for when I get home or reinstall

After using Digg for a few months, I’m hooked. So hooked, in fact, that the following problems have been ignored until Digg 3.0 made them almost insufferable. For the record, I exclusively read the “All Recently Popular” RSS feed via Bloglines in Firefox 1.5.0.4 on Windows XP SP2, on a dual 2.8 GHz PC with 512 MB RAM, with a 10 Mbps line.

Load speed

It often takes several seconds for a story to load. This is very annoying, since the browser locks up completely during that interval. Of course, all that JavaScript takes a while to process, but not everyone goes to Digg for the comments. It would be nice to be able to set up my Digg account (or have separate RSS feeds) to disable JavaScript.

Login

This is the only feature of Digg I absolutely loathe. Especially the fact that I seem to have to login once for each section. Opening 30+ stories at the same time, it’s hard to see which ones are not logged in. And if several tabs are logged out, all but the last story are “lost” – All of them will load the same page (the last one which was logged out) when I log in. Re-reading 150-200 links is not my idea of fun…

The “popular” limit

Digg has grown a lot, and the RSS feed of popular items fills up faster than a Coke bottle with mentos. Nowadays, it seems about 150-200 articles per day end up in this list, and the quality goes down as a smaller percentage of users Digg each “popular” article. The obvious solution is to make the “popular” limit higher or user controllable. Here are some options:

Percentage of user count

Percentage of active users, for some definition of “active”

Some other function of [active] users

User-controllable feed, using parameters to control any settings

Separate “Very popular” list

No direct link

For some stories, the comments are not interesting, and it would be preferable to go directly from the RSS feed to the page in question. It would therefore be nice if you could include the direct link in the feed (or a redirect), perhaps the same way Reddit does. Incidentally, this would fix the login and load speed problems as well…